SYSTEMATIC MURDER

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume 76, 29 July 1941, Page 5

SYSTEMATIC MURDER

3 BLIND, INCURABLES AND AGED j HOW THE NAZIS DO IT [■ A remarkable piece of information appears in the “New Republic” of sth s May. In that issue there is reproduced, j , as basis for an article from the paper's Washington correspondent (or Washing- >, ion editor, as they call them there» a . copy of the Acta Apostolicae Sedis for 15th December, containing a question j to. and answer by. the Pope, writes 1 "Janus” in the London “Spectator I The question was whether it was permissible dicitum) to kill deliberately people who. on account of mental or I physical defects, were no longer able to ; : benefit a nation, but s.mply became a ■ burden to it. The answer was that it • was not. lor such an act was contrary 1 to positive natural and divine Jaw. » There is little in that as it stands, i The interest is in what lay behind it. •'The questioner was a German bishop. ■ the cause of the question the fact that ■ ‘ in September. October and November l of 194 U. 85.000 blind, incurable ill or ;aged Germans were put to death by j the Gestapo. They were put to death I as casually as the S.P.C.A. chloroforms ; old and helpless dogs.” The systematic i murder was discovered when some j priests in the town of Urach noticed ; that elderly people in the hospital were (dying in increasing numbers and dying on certain days of the week. At first poison was injected into their veins: later the injection of an-bubbles (has not Dorothy Sayers exploited the process in one of her books?) was jfound to be as effective and to have the j merit of costing nothing. What the ■ writer rather unnecessarily dignifies with the name euthanasia on the great scale is presumably still continuing. Atrocity stories ought always to be .scrupulously shifted; I am simply summarising the “New Republic” article. But the official Vatican record of the (question and answer is strong presumptive evidence in itself.